How Islam Overtakes Christianity
If things continue the way they have, Islam will overtake Christianity in the next few decades.
Why?
In How Did Islam Spread so Fast, I explained the origins of Islam, and some of the ways it spread so fast. Today, I’m going to do what we did with Christianity: Go deeper into Islam’s software growth strategies and how it distinguished itself from Christianity and Judaism to accelerate its virality. This will help us guess whether this will continue, and at what cost.
1. Islam’s Product
The Beauty of the Quran
I don’t speak Arabic, so I can’t confirm this claim, but apparently the literature of the Quran is so exquisite that it became a sales argument to convert people into Islam: Surely, an illiterate like Muhammad couldn’t have created such beautiful prose by himself; it must have come from God!1
The Ummah
Christianity’s growth took place in the Roman Empire, because it benefited from the peace and trade of the Pax Romana. Peace was a given. Muhammad was not in that world. Arabia suffered tremendously from clan-on-clan aggression. The only way to end that tribal warfare was to create an ethnic unity above the clan: the Ummah. You can’t attack fellow Muslims, so this measure ended all the blood spilled in clan warfare, and replaced it with inter-clan solidarity.2 This was a great source of user acquisition (We need to grow the Ummah!) and retention (You must remain in the Ummah!).
Zakat: Social Security as Subscription
Christianity was the first to make social security a core pillar of growth. But how much should members pay? Can they refuse?
Islam solves this with the Zakat: It’s called charity, but it’s closer to a tax. You’re expected to pay ~2.5% of your wealth every year if you can afford it.
2. Islam’s User Acquisition
Lesser Jihad: Aggressive Sales Tactics
Jesus started preaching to Jews. His apostles broadened the TAM (Target Addressable Market) to the whole of mankind, the first time that had ever happened. The Great Commission tells everybody to go and convert others—quite a viral improvement!
Muhammad’s brilliance was to make that virality aggressive. Islam takes the peaceful proselytism of Christianity, and adds the aggressive growth through the sword. Since Arabs were already accustomed to raiding because of their clan warfare lifestyle (due to the geography of the area), it was just an outward expansion of their existing lifestyle.
Also, the sales team got compelling compensation incentives: a sizable share of revenue generated (i.e., spoils of war).
Sales Bonus
To motivate your sales team, you want to give them a share of the business they generate. In Islam, that’s Ghanimah, and includes 80% of war spoils, plus captives. Not bad!
Your sales team might be a bit too cautious, though, and not go the extra mile. So you want to incentivize them to take risks. The problem is that, in war, taking risks often means death. So, brilliantly, Islam invented the superbonus of heaven with 72 virgins.
Long-Term Onboarding through Jizya and the Dhimma Ratchet
It’s usually a bad idea to force your customer base to convert to your religion. They tend to revolt. So instead, Islam allowed non-believers (the Dhimmi) to keep their religion, but they had to pay higher taxes (Jizya) and had fewer benefits and less access to power. Over long periods of time, this resulted in their conversion to Islam.
Lowest Friction in Onboarding
To convert to Judaism, you have to study for years, and if you’re male, you must cut your penis. To convert to Christianity, you also have to study for years, and to get baptised, you need a profession of faith, repentance of sins, and instruction in church teachings.
In Islam, you just say out loud: "I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God."
Lowest friction onboarding process ever.
Women’s Rights
You don’t only grow by converting new customers, but also by having your customers reproduce more.
We saw how Christianity did this, basically banning all non-vaginal sex, and only allowing it to happen within marriage. But Christianity has a feature that impedes its reproduction rate: With its idea that God loves all the creatures it created, Christianity embedded the future development that women are equal to men.
Muhammad does not say that. For him, men are in charge of women and can even strike them if they disobey. This, in practice, means that men have more access to sex within their marriage, and that the woman is in a weaker position to oppose sex and having more children. In general, more egalitarian societies have fewer children.
Polygyny
Ironically, when Muhammad said men could have four wives, it was meant to be progressive: They could only have four wives.
Did that increase reproduction? I think it depends on which system focuses most male effort on their progeny.
In monogamy, most men have a wife, so most of the resources of each man are dedicated to rearing children, but this is especially true for poor men. Rich men, with only one wife and her children, might have many more resources they’re not dedicating to their children.
In polygyny, many poorer men don’t have a wife (and hence children), so their work is not dedicated to child-rearing. However, a greater share of powerful men’s resources are dedicated to child-rearing, as they have more children with mor women. I’m not sure which one of these two models wins.
However, in polygyny, the stock of poor men without access to women means they’ll be frustrated, and they became a tool for violent expansion of Islam through Jihad.
On balance, I don’t know whether polygyny increased the number of children in Islam, but it certainly increased the “inorganic” growth of Islam—via conquests.
Marriage Asymmetry
Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women,3 but the opposite is forbidden. This makes sense, as the limiting factor for reproduction is female fertility. As a result, Muslim women remain locked into Islam, while Muslim men (less scarce) can go out and take the risk of conversion (both out of Islam for them and into Islam for their wives).
Children Asymmetry
Whereas in Judaism the children of Jewish women are Jewish, Islam asked: Why not make the children of Muslim men Muslim, too?
No need for baptism, even. It’s automatic.
3. Islam’s Retention
If Islam’s user acquisition has been aggressive, its retention has nothing to envy. Taken together, it’s clear why Islam is overtaking Christianity:
